Auto Populate POIs to Tiles in World Editor

[Cpt Krunch]

Hello all,

I havent made any requests or suggestions before now, because most of the mods Ive made maps for in the past have their own dream lists of things they would like to see. Ive been making and releasing customized vanilla and entirely custom hand made type maps since around A17 (17 is still my favorite version for making nice looking maps!). In that time, obviously things have evolved considerably.

For a time I used Nitrogen to make maps, it introduced me to the concept of masking (ie place a pixel in a file where you want a town or city and presto). This was great because I could add a png file height map, then tell Nitro where to place the big things like towns and cities. The major downside to this was having to update the POI tables whenever a Vanilla update made changes, which usually led to either missing or duplicate POIs and a ton of xml work. The other big downside was that while it created  Wilderness roadways, they were faaar from perfect and needed manual editing. Still I always felt like it was a step in the right direction vs the various early iterations of the Vanilla preview gen style of making maps.

When Nitro stopped getting updates, I ended up meeting up and more or less working for KingSlayer as a tester for his newer map gen tool, KingGen. A lot different than Nitro and with a ton more features added, King's focus IMO was on making better quality terrain while also using his own POI tag system in conjunction with the pre tile Vanilla tagging for biome and multi layered zoning. My focus as before was the ability to place everything where i wanted, as well as build out custom POI sets i could drop anywhere and include or exclude POIs from.  By the end of A19, we really achieved all of the initial things that we set out to accomplish, but it was very short lived, as we didnt finish until 19.3. When A20 dropped with tiles that was that for the main generator pieces for KG. King got busy and I still update just for few ppl who still make stuff with it.  Its still useful for the tools we built in and for terrain previews, but no bueno for using tiles.

While Pille was working on the early versions of Teragon generator, I spent a good deal of time getting better at using Vanilla made prefabs.xmls and then creating height maps around those, and then eventually planning out and hand placing tiles for cities tailored to the terrain i created.  Between 19 and 21, the World Editor got a lot faster and cleaner to use. I found myself able to lay down tile areas very quickly and really get exactly what i was going for. (Hats off to TFP for both the tiles and the new POIs, these are extremely well made). 

 

The only real obstacle left I feel at this point is having to manually place POIs into tiles once the tiles are down. The World Editor is really much improved from previous versions, though that might not be immediately apparent to someone not familiar with how it works. The facing arrows are a great addition, but placing everything into multiple tiles, plus losing out on the random parts for the tiles, the end results are still pretty great, but not complete, and still very time consuming. 


My Pimp Dream feature here would be for the addition of a UI button/command to populate a selected tile in the same manner the tile would be generated using Vanilla placement rules. Its really the last piece for players to be able to build out really nice towns and cites without  hours of hand placing and re rotating backwards pieces etc.  I thought this might also be useful for custom POIs for custom tiles, but normal Vanilla RWG tiles will use custom POIs already, so it might be redundant.

Anyway, would love something like this as the game move towards Gold. I think players would use this feature a lot as well. Thanks for everything you guys have done and  are still working on, the last 2 versions really look incredible.

Cheers,

Krunch







 

[Riamus]

This would definitely be helpful to people using RWG and wanting more control over towns.

 

I know the plan is for populating times that are had placed to work in Teragon.  I haven't actually tested it with hands placing a tile to see if it works, though.  I know the repopulate option for group POI isn't working yet and it would be the same command for placing tiles individually in specific locations.  I'll have to check to see if it works for single tiles or if it has the same problem as with groups.

 

I think the biggest issue with tile placement in this way in Teragon is that there isn't an option for Y (elevation), so making all tiles level if the ground isn't level might be tricky.  I'd need to try it out and see.

Edited March 7 by Riamus (see edit history)

[zztong]

1 hour ago, Cpt Krunch said:

My Pimp Dream feature here would be for the addition of a UI button/command to populate a selected tile in the same manner the tile would be generated using Vanilla placement rules.

 

In A20 this was a demonstrated feature in the Prefab Editor. That is, hit a button when editing a Tile and it would show you a random selection of POIs and Parts. However, in A20 it never quite worked, always showing you the same POIs, not rerandomizing each time as it had been demonstrated.

 

In A21, I don't think the feature is available.

 

I mention this because perhaps something like what you want already partly exists but is disabled, perhaps because of bugs.

[Cpt Krunch]

13 minutes ago, zztong said:

 

In A20 this was a demonstrated feature in the Prefab Editor. That is, hit a button when editing a Tile and it would show you a random selection of POIs and Parts. However, in A20 it never quite worked, always showing you the same POIs, not rerandomizing each time as it had been demonstrated.

 

In A21, I don't think the feature is available.

 

I mention this because perhaps something like what you want already partly exists but is disabled, perhaps because of bugs.

Now that you mention it, I remember that, and I think at some point, it just switched to immovable highlight boxes for each POI slot and that gave me the auto populate. Even just to start out with the same one set of POIs would be a step closer, as the swap feature is enabled now, its not ideal, but it would at least populate the parts for each tile.



 

[Riamus]

Well, I tested adding a tile and using the repopulate option in Teragon and it works.  I added one of ZZTong's tiles to the map with Create POI and enabled the repopulate option and this is the result:

 

Note that I only added the tile.  Everything else was added automatically by using the repopulate option.  So if you wanted to and had flat terrain to do it, you could use this command to add tiles in a layout you want and it will add all the prefabs and parts to the tiles for you.  However, I don't know how well it works for keeping duplicates separate.  It *should* follow the normal duplicate and theme repeat/distance values but I don't know for certain.  Still, this gives you a working solution as long as you have flat terrain where you can place the tiles.

 

EDIT: Okay, so Teragon does have a Vertical Offset parameter that would let you place tiles on rough terrain and get them level with one another but it would be trial and error to figure out the right offsets for each tile.  Far easier to just make a flat area on the heightmap and not deal with that.

Edited March 8 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Cpt Krunch]

16 hours ago, Riamus said:

Well, I tested adding a tile and using the repopulate option in Teragon and it works.  I added one of ZZTong's tiles to the map with Create POI and enabled the repopulate option and this is the result:

 

Note that I only added the tile.  Everything else was added automatically by using the repopulate option.  So if you wanted to and had flat terrain to do it, you could use this command to add tiles in a layout you want and it will add all the prefabs and parts to the tiles for you.  However, I don't know how well it works for keeping duplicates separate.  It *should* follow the normal duplicate and theme repeat/distance values but I don't know for certain.  Still, this gives you a working solution as long as you have flat terrain where you can place the tiles.

 

EDIT: Okay, so Teragon does have a Vertical Offset parameter that would let you place tiles on rough terrain and get them level with one another but it would be trial and error to figure out the right offsets for each tile.  Far easier to just make a flat area on the heightmap and not deal with that.

This is a great place to start. I have no idea how to do this in Tergaon, but Im going to dig back in, ive tested a few other feature and had no issues, i will have look closer tonight. If i can place say 10 tiles, even if i have to populate each one at a time, unless they are completely clones, its easy enough to swap what i need out, i have tables from a python script for all the sizes and tier quests, so i can balance using that.

[Riamus]

3 hours ago, Cpt Krunch said:

This is a great place to start. I have no idea how to do this in Tergaon, but Im going to dig back in, ive tested a few other feature and had no issues, i will have look closer tonight. If i can place say 10 tiles, even if i have to populate each one at a time, unless they are completely clones, its easy enough to swap what i need out, i have tables from a python script for all the sizes and tier quests, so i can balance using that.

I'll be online in around 3 hours unless I'm playing a game, so feel free to check in with me on Teragon's discord and I can walk you through it.  I did write up info on it in the discussions channel last night that you can also look at.  Basically, you place the tile with the Create POI command and make sure repopulate tiles is checked.  Use a new Create POI command for each tile and just adjust the coordinates by 150 in the direction the tile is from the previous tile.  Just verify rotation for the tiles and it should work fine.  A bit time consuming, but not too bad.